Dan Rorke, at the outset of the round, had drawn in a deep breath; and he had held it. This, together with his wild exertions, had turned his complexion to a purple red. Then, suddenly, as he fell, he had relaxed his muscles and his breath; and had at once taken another breath and had rolled his eyes upward. The receding blood had left his face a chalky green. Long rehearsed acting had done the rest. After that first frenzied glare at the referee he had let his head droop and had hidden his slowly incarnadining cheeks from further view. The one glimpse of his corpse-like face was enough for Honest Roy.
“You see, Danny,” apologised Keegan, when he had half carried his principal to the dressing room, “it was the only way out. We either misjudged that Feltman bird wrong or else we overplayed the big improvement you’ve been making these past few months. One or the other. It don’t matter which. The way it lays, you ain’t good enough—not yet—to go up against a top-notcher like him. I seen that before you’d been in the ring two rounds. He was a-eating you up. It was either pull the good old foul claim or stand for a knock-out. I didn’t dast give you the office for any funny business. Not with Honest Roy refereeing. He’s a crank on square fighting, Roy Constantin is. He’d ‘a’ spotted any of our best ones. So I had to frame it, other way round. But it was a close call, at that!”
When Red Keegan picked Dan Rorke out of the night-shift puddler crew at the Pitvale Steel Works he did so after a long psychological study. This study dealt much with the young middleweight’s rugged strength and gameness and his natural skill as a fighter. But it concerned itself equally with Rorke’s innate gifts for more subtle things; among the rest, a certain crude ability for acting. Then he had moulded the ignorant boy according to his own wily plans.
As a man, Keegan was not a marked success. As a crooked diplomatist, he had sparks of genius. Too fragile and too timid to hit a blow himself, he was a born ring general. And it was his joy and his talent to study out more foul tactics than occur to the normal fighter’s bovine brain in the course of a life-time.
None of these manœuvres came under the head of “rough stuff” or even of “coarse work.” There was a finesse to them all. They could be pulled—rightly learned by the right man—under the very nose of the average referee.
Not once, but six times, had Dan Rorke gone into the ring, coached by Keegan, and bested men who were his superiors. He had done it by a succession of crafty and murderous fouls, which the referee failed to bring home to him.
Twice, by unobtrusive butting, in the course of a clinch, he had ripened his half-stunned antagonist for an easy knock-out. Again, he had driven his specially shod heel down on the instep of Spider Boyce with such scientific force as to make the sufferer drop his guard long enough to let in a haymaker to the jaw. Surreptitious kneeing was another of his arts.
All these tricks seem broad and obvious in the telling. So would a full description of the method whereby a conjurer hauls a kicking rabbit out of an empty hat. It is all in the way it is done. And, thanks to Red Keegan’s tireless rehearsing and to his own peculiar talents, Rorke did it in a way to defy casual detection.
When an overkeen referee happened to be the third man in the ring there were other tactics to fall back on. In such event and with a too formidable opponent, there were still divers means for wooing victory—the claim of foul and the white-faced anguish, for example. Twice before, in other sections of the fight map, had Rorke and Keegan worked this bit of acting.
As a result Dan Rorke was rising fairly fast in his profession. He was not of championship timber. He would never develop into such a contender; nor does one real-life fighter in fifty. But he was good enough to do all manner of things to dozens of fairly good men in the rank and file of the middleweight army. And the dollars were drifting in.